Katherine Keenum

A blog about how paintings, photographs, and prints have helped me visualize my fiction—both Where the Light Falls and works-in-progress—with a hope that they will stimulate other writers and readers, too.

A small sample of the images that inspired me appears below. Click on these or any images in the posts to see enlargements. In the text, click on colored words to activate links.

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Picturing a World

When I read Philip Pullman’s new novel, La Belle Sauvage last fall, I noted with a little puzzlement that he has the hero, Malcolm, explain the name of his canoe by saying that an uncle owns a pub called La Belle Sauvage downriver. (more…)

The conceptual artist Catherine Chaloux tickles my fancy. Although fantasy fiction is a part of my reading and writing life, I have not reacted to her witty, luscious work as a source of stories so much as illustrations of my imaginary self. This picture combines (more…)

Some of my favorite novels are fantasies. For a holiday treat, I read Patricia McKillip’s Od Magic. It is a lovely, lively story and I was specially interested in how McKillip interwove four plot lines. It allowed her to jump over the (more…)

Images inspire writing. Among my desktop folders, I have one for Pictures Demanding Stories—or, in Greer Gilman’s more potent term, Story-seeds. This image by Rovina Cai instantly called to mind Gilman’s work. I’m tickled pink that she agrees. Here’s hoping that one day she’ll tell us the story! (As for me, it's back to ANONYMITY and, well, to some other fiction that insists on being written.)

Blog tip: Writer, artist, and editor Terry Windling posts today on Stories that matter. She quotes other writers who share her philosophy (and mine) that real writing is what you must do because you can't not do it. The post is illustrated with fantasy images by Nadeshda Illarionova, whose pictures could easily inspire a fairy tale of your own. Check'em out!

Blog tip: Any of you who read fantasy fiction know Terri Windling as a writer or editor. I have just stumbled across her blog Myth and Moor while researching Glasgow women artists (I think Amy Richardson may wind up in Glasgow). A visit to her page is a two-fer, Windling herself and Jessie M. King.